Blogging is an important part of any digital marketing strategy. Improving your website rankings on search engines like Google, building your audience and providing your clients and potential clients with valuable and interesting content. These are just a few reasons why posting regular blogs to your website are important.
IN THIS ARTICLE YOU WILL LEARN ABOUT:
- The minimum number of words a blog post should have to be recognised by Google
- The ideal length a blog post should be so Google gives you some serious love
- How to structure your blog post
- Why using headings and subheadings is important
- The most important thing to consider when writing your blog post
WHAT’S THE MINIMUM NUMBER OF WORDS A BLOG POST SHOULD BE?
Google requires a page/post to have a minimum of 300 words for it to be recognised. Any less than this, your post will not have enough words, specifically not enough few keywords, to rank in search engines.
As a rule of thumb 300 words is the minimum number of words we recommend.
That said Google loves long articles.
Long articles of 1000 words or more rank higher by Google this is because they will usually have more keywords and long tail keyword variants that really help people find your post when searching online.
If you are fining it hard to get those longer articles aim for 700 words, double the minimum amount so it should contain more keywords.
WHY STRUCTURING YOUR BLOG POST IS IMPORTANT?
Having a clear structure and flow to your blog post is important in ensuring your reader will get to the end of your post. An easy to read and easy to navigate structure will make your article an enjoyable read and keep the reader engaged.
A summary serves a few purposes:
- It provides the reader with a clear outline of the topic covered
- It allows you to get more of those long tail keywords in your post
- This summary also gives the author a list of the questions they wish to cover in post. How awesome is that!
HEADER TAGS – WHY DO THEY MATTER?
If you’re using WordPress or a similar website editor you can select text and turn it into a heading using a dropdown button from your text editor.
Header tags are hidden HTML code that structure and style your blog posts. Web designers use H1–H6 tags to provide a clear hierarchical structure to the content that is visible to both humans and computers (the reader and search engines) who are both reading your post, just in slightly different ways.
You should only ever use one H1 tag per page and that honour should be given to the most important heading. This would be your page/post title, e.g “How to write blog posts that Google loves” has been given the H1 tag in this post. You will notice that this title is larger and stands out in comparison to other headings in the post making it clear to the reader that it’s the most important.
H1 tags signify the same level of value to search engines—they know to give more weight to H1 tags over H2, H3, etc.
The second level of headings should be styled by H2 tags. And if your post requires smaller subheadings under that they would use H3 tags and so on. Usually you’ll only need to use up to the H2 or H3 tags.
Don’t use H tags for text like “Call us on 0400…” or to make an entire paragraph stand out. This is not what H tags are for. They really should be used as a means of telling Google and other search engine’s what information is important and what your content is about.
If you want to use heading tags for styling your text use the H4, H5 and H6 tags only. These tags don’t carry much weight with Google and therefore your web page won’t be indexed for random words/phrases unnecessarily.
PRO TIP: You should include your keywords in your headings as much as possible. If Google gives your heading tags more weight, then including your post’s keywords and long tail keywords in your headings will help you appear in more search results.
THE WRAP UP
This post contains a ton of pointers, so let’s recap.
- Make sure your post contains a minimum of 300 words.
- Google loves long articles so try to make yours 700–1000 words or even longer.
- However, don’t bulk up your content with fluff just to make it longer and without providing any real value to your readers.
- Don’t over use your keywords. Keeping your post easy to read is key.
- Give your blog posts a clear, easy to follow structure.
- Use the H1 HTML tag for your post’s title.
- Use H2 & H3 tags for your posts headings and subheadings.
- Don’t sacrifice your blog post’s readability for better search engine visibility.
